Capitalist literary criticism?

For those wishing a deeper—or at least more academic—understanding of some famous piece of literature, a "Case Studies in Literary Criticism" volume on it almost certainly exists, and almost certainly includes a section on "Marxist criticism and X" (Madame Bovary, or whatever), alongside sections on feminist criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, deconstruction, and so on. In my days of dogmatic slumber, I would see these lists and think, oh, yes, those are the varieties of criticism. But now those lists strike me as quite strange. Psychoanalytic criticism draws on Freud's theory of the mind; it assumes that his theory can help us better understand literature. But it can only help if it is true. And it is, to say the least, controversial. There are competing theories of the mind out there, which might be true instead. How come none of those alternatives has generated a school of literary criticism? Similarly Marxism—my focus here—is, among other things, a thesis about which form of economic organization is most just. Under capitalism, the idea goes, the “means of production” (factory equipment, for example) are privately owned, and employers exploit their workers, paying them less than they deserve. Under socialism, by contrast, the workers would collectively own the equipment, and this wouldn’t happen. (This is middle-school level Marxism, but it is good enough for here.) Plenty of people disagree, thinking that capitalism is better than socialism. So why is there no literary criticism practiced from that point of view?

It turns out there is. Literature & the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture, edited by Paul Cantor and Stephen Cox, recently floated onto my radar screen, and is a kind of manifesto for an anti-Marxist, pro-capitalist literary criticism. They ask,

Might forms of economic thinking sympathetic to free markets be more helpful in analyzing literature than Marxism, with its unrelenting hostility to capitalism?

Maybe!

So I opened the book with curiosity and read the first chapter. It is 98 pages long and bears the promising if intimidating title “The Poetics of Spontaneous Order: Austrian Economics and Literary Criticism.” A lot of it addresses the question of whether literature written for a mass audience in a market economy (rather than, say, in an ivory tower for oneself, or at court for the Queen) tends to be of higher, or lower, quality. I guess Marxists say “lower,” and Cantor says “higher,” but this isn’t really what I was looking for.

In general, the paper contains few claims about how to interpret or evaluate particular literary works from a pro-capitalist perspective. The main exception is the beginning, where something interesting is promised. Let’s agree that a work of literature that exhibits some kind of unity is for that reason good, and that it is a flaw in a work if it is disunified (at least other things being equal). Cantor claims that once one understands capitalism, and the case for capitalism, one will see that there is a heretofore unknown kind of unity, and so that certain pieces of literature that had been though bad for lack of unity (he gives a few examples), are in fact unified.

But his thesis turns out to be much less interesting than it seems. Cantor starts from the observation that economic activity can be well-coordinated (so that what people want to buy is sold in stores, and what factories make, people want to buy, and so on), even if no central authority tells each economic actor what to do; this is just Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the marketplace. Now so far the claim is just that order (which we make take to be a kind of unity) has more than one possible cause (a single central authority versus a large collection of individuals each responding to local incentives). Cantor next claims that these causes produce different kinds of order:

spontaneous orders always betray the history of their coming into being and hence display a certain messiness by comparison with consciously designed orders.

This observation is then applied to literature:

This insight might help us mediate between the extreme positions of the New Criticism and Deconstruction, that literature is either wholly ordered or wholly disordered.

Large-scale literary works such as the novel may allow for a different kind of order than the lyric poem—one that can admit more messiness, the kind of imperfections that characterize a spontaneous order [... But this] does not necessarily impugn [a novel’s] fundamental integrity as a work of art. It suggests [only] that the novel is not entirely perfect according to a New Critical conception of literary form.

Cantor says a novel may have a “different kind of order,” but he has not earned this conclusion. In fact he is merely saying that order comes in degrees, and so just because something is not perfectly ordered, does not mean that it is completely disordered, and so a novel that is not perfectly ordered might still be ordered to a high degree, and therefore quite good. This is a banal conclusion, and if literary critics did not know it already, their field is in pretty bad shape. Anyway, no knowledge of economics, much less of the finer details of the Austrian variety, is needed to figure it out.

A big challenge the authors of this book face, I think, is that the mirror image of Marxism is not simply “capitalism good.” Marxism has a theory of culture, and that theory provides tools that are useful in literary criticism. Part of any culture is a collection of ideas treated as obvious common sense. A culture, for example, might elevate the idea that freedom is good, or that it is okay to be mostly selfish. Marxists (generally—of course they come in a wide variety) hold that these ideas have a function; they are there for a reason. Their function is to rationalize the culture’s form of economic organization. They are supposed to make that form of economic organization look good, morally speaking. A capitalist culture, for example, will (according to Marxists) treat as obvious ideas that, if believed, will leave workers thinking they are not being exploited and everything is fine.

This theory of culture creates a job-opening for literary critics who want to contribute to the Marxist cause. Since works of literature, and artworks generally, are part of culture, they contribute to culture’s rationalization function, and the critic can ferret out what contribution this novel or that poem makes. What’s more, since in fact (the Marxist says) capitalism is unjust, it cannot in fact be justified, and so any attempt to do so breaks down somewhere. So the critic can also look for where, in a given work, this happens: where it papers over or tries to suppress, for example, worker exploitation.

From what I read, the pro-capitalists do not have an alternative view about “the” ideological function of literature, which literary critics could rally around. More generally, their political and economic ideas do not give critics interested in interpreting literature new questions to ask and new tools for answering them. They could, possibly, pursue a conservative agenda, urging critics to turn back to the kinds of questions they used to ask, and arguing that the new questions Marxists ask, for example about how a work reflects the social class of its author, or how it reinforces the social order, are bad questions based on false theoretical foundations.¹ Unfortunately, even if true, this is hardly the stuff of an inspiring call to arms.

1. Cantor does mention that Marxists tend to denigrate the role of an artist’s creativity in the production of their work, instead asserting that impersonal market forces largely determine what gets made; and pro-capitalists do the opposite, emphasizing the importance of creative entrepreneurship generally, and so also, in the arts, of the artist’s personal vision. But even this is just to go back to a pre-Marxist way of thinking.